Stat

Forgive me if I act the fool.
It’s just a way of coping.
My stomach lurches,
there never are enough words to be precise.
Let’s try this one more time.
If aging is just learning to feel less
then I don’t want this.
There’s really no accurate way
to put a whole species’ worth of confusion
into one sentence.
You reach out so blindly
but I don’t know how to speak,
one person can’t be another’s answer.
I say “42”
but I mean “I don’t know”.
How can it be harder to be soft
than to be hard?
I just don’t know.
Surely it’s not easy for any involved.
You hone yourself to an edge
rewrite reality
and wish crab grass on the other side of the fence.
The hard little bit inside me
rattles around
knocks imperiously against the soft shell—
I’m an inside-out snail.
We both fail
trailing our litany of relationships,
of conversations never had,
lies we didn’t realize we were telling,
somnambulistic,
we’d call it inevitable if we heard ourselves speaking
but our lips don’t move
so we can pretend at silence,
just another teaspoon of perjured sighs
for a bucket of statistics.